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Pidgin English: A Bridge for our Cleavage

Wait, the Pidgin I know? That’s for the uneducated folks only. Did you just say that? Then you are wrong. The importance of this debased language is far beyond what you think. This is not a new discovery. It’s a fact. That’s why many people campaigned for the pidgin (or, better, the Creole) spoken in their countries to be formalized, standardized and even officialised. But that was barely achieved in a few nations like Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Sierra Leon. Although India is far more diverse than Nigeria, many Indians are often amazed that we speak English among ourselves, and not ‘Nigerian’. They think there is a popular language used in the country by that name the same way Hindi is in India. We only have Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) spoken by a healthy minority, I…